Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  It was an inauspicious voyage. The first night out great seas broke over the steamer, sweeping away gunwales and timbers and flooding the forward staterooms with enough water to float a case of claret, and the lifeboats were readied. During the calmer days that followed, as they sailed within sight of the Mexican coast, Clemens came to know the captain who brought them through that night, a Connecticut Yankee—he was born in Westport—who by sea had followed the course of American empire westward. Ned Wakeman was already a California folk hero. He had been under piracy charges in 1850 for stealing a paddlewheel steamer from under the sheriff’s nose in New York and sailing her around the Horn. In San Francisco he had served as a vigilante and hanged at least two men. For such services the citizens honored him with a silver speaking trumpet, a breast-pin cluster of nine diamonds, and a gold watch, which, along with a gold anchor and a gold ring, hung from his neck on a massy chain seven feet long. Bearded and big-bellied, he was tattooed from head to foot—with the Goddess of Liberty holding the Stars and Stripes, a clipper ship under full sail, Christ on the Cross, and an assortment of Masonic devices. Wakeman was a blasphemer of remarkable vividness, something of an eccentric theologian, and above all a teller of stories about rats as big and lean as greyhounds, about snakes as long as a ship’s mainmast was high, and about the Monkey Islands, where his first mate counted ninety-seven million monkeys before the pencils wore out and his arm became paralyzed with ciphering. A week out of San Francisco Sam concluded, “I’d rather travel with that portly, hearty, boisterous, good-natured sailor, Captain Ned Wakeman, than with any other man I ever came across.” More than forty years after this voyage, after a few more meetings and many more stories (including a dream of Wakeman’s about sailing to heaven), Wakeman still lived in Mark Twain’s imagination as an archangel. In the story Mark Twain published in 1909 Wakeman on the deck of his storm-beaten ship became Captain Stormfield, who raced comets to heaven like a reckless river pilot, and “Stormfield” was the name of Mark Twain’s villa on top of a hill in Connecticut, his last home.

  When Clemens left the America to cross the Isthmus, he left behind, in the heroic, dominating apparition of Wakeman, the only brightness in a depressing voyage which in all other respects resembled the dark fantasy voyages he was to write about in the 1890s, when he was heartbroken and bankrupt. There had been one death already, a child, who was buried at sea. On the overland trip cholera entered the steerage class, and once they boarded the San Francisco at Greytown it spread through the ship and along the entire social scale, from barber to Episcopalian clergyman. Before they reached New York it claimed at least eight lives. “The passengers say we are out of luck,” Clemens wrote in his notebook, plainly frightened, “and that it is a doomed voyage.” He reminded himself to get a list of the dead from the first officer to telegraph to his paper, if they should ever reach port. The engine had begun to break down, there were three failures in three days, and the ship drifted by the hour. The living and the dying were filled with brandy, and for their amusement a drunken monkey, fed a brandy-soaked banana or a square drink, and dressed in black pants and a vest—gift of the ship’s sewing circle—tottered and screeched in the rigging.

  Throughout this voyage, even with death so near at hand, the face of gentility frowned on Clemens. A lady all in brown, backbiter, gossip—“damned old meddling moralizing fool”—said he drank too much, was often as drunk as the piper that played before Moses, played cards all night, was coarse and disgusting and clearly not a gentleman. He liked to sing, but the choir group that sang “Marching through Georgia” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” would have none of him. His drawl was unmistakably that of a Southerner. (He would not want to tell them that at the beginning of the war he had got himself sworn in as a Confederate irregular, but had deserted after two weeks of rain and retreat and had gone West for the duration.) On the lake steamer that took him across the Isthmus he had twice been offended by pursers who let other first-cabin passengers and even some from steerage go on deck unchallenged but said to him, “None but first cabin allowed up here. You first cabin?” He was ostentatiously shabby, but he was first cabin and had known celebrity, and he resented the emphatic “you.” Among bohemians he was content to be a bohemian with a suggestion of the roughneck. The ship’s manifest, drawn up by a playful officer, listed him as “Mark Twain, barkeeper, San Francisco,” and he liked that.

  But there was another side to his identity, a side which he had kept hidden in the West and which now bitterly minded even petty rejections by these farflung pickets of Eastern gentility. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had been a man of precise and grammatical manners, a lawyer and holder of public office. He was a chronic business failure as farmer, storekeeper, trader, and land speculator, and his wife and children were accustomed to being poor, but still he was known as Judge Clemens, was president of the Library Association and chairman of the Committee on Roads, and was accounted one of the first citizens of Hannibal. Along with pride in his Virginia ancestry he left to his family when he died in 1847 about seventy thousand acres of land in Fentress County, Tennessee, and his widow and children considered themselves prospectively rich. So far the land was good only for potatoes and wild grass, but coal, copper, and iron deposits might be discovered any day now, a new railroad would triple the value of the land, a visionary new purchaser might turn up—with such chimeras Jane, Orion, and Pamela were to occupy themselves long after Sam forswore the whole bitter business. They had been landowners and slaveholders, and among their other grandeurs they claimed a relationship to a Roundhead judge who had sent King Charles I to the block; they also claimed a wondrously exiguous connection with the earls of Durham. They were respectable gentry, poor now, but with hopes, and among these hopes, second only to the Tennessee land, was Sam.

  He was, at the very least, already a double creature. He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside. The Hartford literary gentleman lived inside the sagebrush bohemian. But even outwardly Sam Clemens was far different from any conventional Western journalist and rough. He had been a sickly infant, born two months prematurely, and had barely survived his first two years. He grew up sparely built, small-boned, with narrow sloping shoulders, five feet eight inches tall, a contrast with the brawny miners he knew in Nevada; all his life he liked to elaborate fantasies about small men with unsuspected gigantic strength who were always surprising people with it. His head, like a child’s, seemed too large for his body. He had delicate hands, which quivered when he was stirred, and tapering fingers with pink nails. His mouth, Kipling said, was “as delicate as a woman’s.” He was sensitive about animals, timid about asking questions of strangers, and he was fastidious. When Clemens had been in the East for only a few years, William Dean Howells noticed something about him that was remarkable in an American of the time and especially remarkable in a Westerner: he never pawed, he was no back-slapper or arm-squeezer, he avoided touching other people. He was excitable, easily hurt, desperately hungry for affection and tenderness, often depressed, capable of great rage and greater remorse. He remained, in many ways, a child demanding attention in a nursery which was as large as the world; his wife was to call him “Youth” and “Little Man,” and to Howells he had the heart of a willful boy.

  On the last night at sea, off the New Jersey coast, came the last death of this voyage which had been as spectral as any of Mark Twain’s voyage fantasies. The medical report, in order to circumvent quarantine, read “dropsy.” On the morning of January 12, 1867, twenty-seven and a half days out of San Francisco, Clemens breathed in the biting air on the upper deck as his ship passed the snow-covered houses of Staten Island and crushed its way through the ice toward Castle Garden and the city that lay north of it, a forest of church steeples palisaded by masts.

  II

  To be in New York in 1867 was to be at the scrambling center of American life. Six years of war and peace had made it a city of extremes and contradictions, where the best and the
worst, the highest and the lowest, existed side by side in sunshine and shadow, in splendor and squalor. The white marble palace of A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince who vied with William B. Astor for the title of richest man in the city, rose in Italianate grandeur over the shanties behind Fifth Avenue. The old aristocracy, cultivated and traveled, claimed that inflation was crushing them, and they moved into remote new streets uptown to wait for the crash that would bring back the old order. Prosperous crowds and a tremendous traffic of vehicles surged along Broadway, directed by the elite of the police force. But in the Five Points section of the lower East Side, home of ragpickers, prostitutes, new immigrants, and the desperate poor, crime reached a level of such frequency and violence that the police were afraid even to patrol. On Sundays the upright and well-dressed, acceptable in the sight of both Lorenzo Delmonico and the Deity, went to services at Bishop Southgate’s or across the river at Henry Ward Beecher’s in Brooklyn, to be reassured that godliness and prosperity went hand in hand, mostly to see and be seen, the ladies patting their tiny hats which looked like jockey saddles and batter cakes. On Sundays those of New York’s ten thousand saloons that observed the closing laws sent their customers thronging by ferryboat to the doggeries of Hoboken.

  New York’s port faced east toward Europe, and the city was shipping center, temple of trade and commerce. Wartime finance had made Wall Street powerful. The city’s population of nearly one and a half million, the largest in the country, supported five major newspapers, some of them with national circulation and influence. Fashion and manners were dictated from Manhattan Island. Its twelve or so theaters and palaces of entertainment—the number subject to change with each fire alarm—were supported, then as ever, by outlanders who could choose among a variety of attractions that included leg shows, melodrama, and Barnum’s Happy Family. The city had already become the printing, publishing, and book-manufacturing center of the nation. It was no Boston; high culture had not flourished in New York. It had a literary tradition of a sort, ranging from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to the group led by Walt Whitman and the publisher Henry Clapp that before the war had crowded into Pfaff’s beer cellar under the Broadway pavement near Bleecker Street. But the tradition was miscellaneous, flavored with journalism, never deeply rooted. Both William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, soon to become custodians of the Boston tradition, served briefly in the New York literary world in the 1860s. They were not sorry to leave. “Better fifty years of Boston than a cycle of New York,” said Howells. The city was dedicated to popular culture, but it also originated a few literary and intellectual magazines that conferred almost as much distinction on their contributors as the august Atlantic, if no money at all. The Nation, started by E. L. Godkin three months after Appomattox, was New York in nativity even if, as some claimed, it was mainly Bostonian in spirit. Henry Clapp’s urbane, venturesome, and incurably penniless Saturday Press had just gone broke, but not before publishing Walt Whitman as well as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” A month before Sam Clemens arrived in New York Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published his “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” his account of the survivors of the burned clipper ship Hornet. (The following May he was mortified to discover that in the magazine’s annual index he was listed as “Mark Swain.”)

  When William Dean Howells came to Boston in 1860, at the age of twenty-three, he was a pilgrim from the Midwest worshiping at the feet of New England’s literary great. It was with a sense of entering another world altogether that this postulant sat through a four-hour dinner in a private room at the Parker House with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had given the Atlantic its name, James T. Fields, its publisher, and James Russell Lowell, its editor in chief. With an informality Howells would never have guessed in Columbus, Ohio, these eminences addressed each other as “James” and “Wendell,” as if they were all still boys together. About the time the coffee came in, the dapper little doctor cast a smiling glance at Howells and, turning to Lowell, said, “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” For Howells this was intoxication. Even though it was to be six years yet, and by way of a term as American consul in Venice and literary journalist in New York, before he came to the Atlantic as assistant editor (and eleven years before the title of editor in chief, in apostolic succession, would be bestowed upon him), Howells had a sure, unwavering vocation in Boston and in literature. Sam Clemens came to New York not as a pilgrim but as a miner staking out a claim and beginning to work it. His ambitions were not those hallowed in literary Boston. They lay in a still-unmapped area bounded by journalism, humor, entertainment, and popular literature. He was convinced, after only a few months, that he had made the right choice in coming to this city. “Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man,” he reported, with a prophetic pun, to his California readers. “With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over, without fear—but without it you are speculating upon a dangerous issue.”

  The city offered him abundant material for his travel letters. From his rooming house on East Sixteenth Street he set out daily to cover the sights. He kept to Broadway, he said, so as not to get lost, and he went on foot. The omnibuses were overcrowded, often mired in slush and traffic, and they swayed so violently that passengers had been known to become seasick; even a veteran rider could be flung to the street by a lurch, a whipping up of the horses. It was a cruel winter; rain and slush gave way to a treacherous hard freeze during which people crossing on the East River ice from Brooklyn to New York might find themselves trapped in mid-passage, the ice flashing into sudden fragments. Fourteen years earlier, as a wandering printer with a ten-dollar bill sewn into the lining of his coat, Sam had spent a brief summer in New York. He had visited the World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace, where each day came six thousand visitors, double the population of Hannibal, and he had taken a liking to the city; he had found it as hard to leave as Hannibal had been easy. Since then, he felt, it had become too big a city. A business trip or a friendly visit often took up a whole day, the streets were so congested and so full of distractions. They echoed with the sounds of hammering and building, of that tremendous activity which the end of the Civil War had unleashed in America. At Fulton Street a pedestrian bridge of cast iron—along with brownstone, iron was to the Gilded Age what limestone was to the age of the Pharaohs—was going up; the Broadway traffic had become too thick to be crossed any other way. Prices for board and lodging had nearly tripled since his first visit. Waiters and bartenders, barbers and cigar vendors had become insolent with prosperity, and all things and all men conspired to keep prices up. Eggs were sixty cents a dozen, whiskey and gin fifteen cents a drink; almost everyone was feeling the pinch of inflation. All in all, he figured, a single man of moderate habits might be able to get along on forty or fifty dollars a week, but he saw no hope for the married ones. There were beggars on the streets, blind men, peddlers who sold dancing animals on India-rubber strings. But these people on the very margin of existence were not the returned soldiers, he said in a sudden celebration of the national spirit. The heroes had been absorbed into civilian life. “It is hard even for an American to understand this,” he reported. “But it is a toiling, thinking, determined nation, this of ours, and little given to dreaming. Our Alexanders do not sit down and cry because there are no more worlds to conquer, but snatch off their coats and fall to shinning around and raising corn and cotton, and improving sewing machines.” Sam himself, beguiled as always by mechanical improvements, reported on a primitive typesetting machine which had a bank of keys like a melodeon, and, with that fatal inclination to hope and believe the utmost of such things, he passed on the information that the patent rights had brought “fabulous sums.”

  Seeing the sights brought him to the fashionable churches; to the Russian Baths, where steam and ice showers, followed by a friendly drink with the manager, cured a bad cold and a feeling of oppression in the brain; to the theater, where he saw
The Black Crook. This was a barely acceptable marriage of ballet and burlesque which nightly for years titillated huge audiences and whose appeal Sam candidly analyzed: “When they put beautiful clipper built girls on the stage in this new fashion, with only just barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing, it is a shrewd invention of the devil.” “The scenery and the legs are everything,” he concluded. One night he saw another facet of life in the East that would mean more to him than either church or theater. The Century Association, he told his readers, was the “most unspeakably respectable” club in the entire country. He noted the excellence of the brandy punch, the food, and the conversation and was struck by the singular fact that so few of the older members were bald. The hat sizes averaged about number eleven, he figured, and what impressed him most was that the club had a tendency to exclude those who had bank accounts but no brains. This was a long way from the land of the silver millionaires. “I have some idea of putting in my application,” he joked; “I won’t need to belong till I get old.” Within a decade Samuel L. Clemens of Hartford, Connecticut, would be the darling of such clubs—the Players and the Lotos in New York, the Savage in London—and in his old age it was from such clubs that, surfeited with banqueting and after-dinner speeches, he would make his way late at night to Riverdale or his last New York house, on lower Fifth Avenue.